Abstract:

A Frenchman dances around a Chinese man, saying that this is the way men in France dance to attract women.
EN CHINE. (In China) This series consists of 27 prints which were published in the CHARIVARI between December 1858 and April 1860. A drawn double frame embraces each print. The numbers appear as follows: 1 to 7 are being repeated, while 11, 16, 20, and 22 are missing.
The prints DR 3096 to DR 3124 deal with the intervention of England and France in China. After the assassination of several Christian missionaries in China, Canton was occupied by European troops in 1857. The treaty of Tien-Tsin accorded to Western states to send ambassadors to the court of the Chinese emperor and to open the harbors to European products. Since China didn’t honor the treaty, the occupation of Beijing followed and in 1860 a new treaty was drawn.
CHINA. Daumier was quite unique in expressing common day behaviour in an exotic surrounding, while still making the viewer understand the hidden message without reading the caption. He succeeded in projecting typically French activities of daily life into an exotic setting, which would eventually distort the obvious while leaving the provocative message intact.
He chose China as a setting for his lithographs since especially during the period of the early 1840s Chinese curios as well as chinoiseries had become fashionable. The middle class followed the taste set by the King in 1842 who had parts of the palace redecorated in Chinese style. The dresses shown in the “Voyage en Chine” series have been “adjusted” to what a bourgeois Parisian would expect a Chinese to look like, sporting Chinese embroidering, ankle length wide trousers and flat slippers with upturned toes. The ladies’ hair was also worn the Chinese way, while some of the men wore the long, “typically Chinese” braid.